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The Pope has an antidote to ‘brain rot’
December 06, 2024
10 Reactions
The Oxford English Dictionary has selected “brain rot” as its word of the year. As the Christmas holidays approach, other dictionaries and publications have nominated their own neologisms. The Collins English Dictionary chose “brat”, which Kamala Harris was apparently. I still don’t know what it means. The Macquarie Dictionary, the leading Australian dictionary, chose “enshittification”, which confirms British stereotypes about Aussie yobbos. The Economist chose “kakistocracy’, the rule of the worst, which, it says, fits President Trump’s cabinet nominees.
The others will fade, but brain rot is here to stay. It refers to the intellectual decay caused by overuse of social media, video gaming, doom-scrolling, zombie-scrolling, and so on. If you want to research the area further, check out the fabulously popular Skibidi Toilet videos, about animated toilets with talking heads trying to take over the world.
Or maybe you shouldn’t – vulgar, brainless, meaningless, monotonous idiocy has an addictive fascination. They have been viewed 18 billion (yes, billion) times. Well, 18 billion and 7 – it's hard to stop, believe you me.
“‘Brain rot’ speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, and how we are using our free time. It feels like a rightful next chapter in the cultural conversation about humanity and technology,” Casper Grathwohl, President of Oxford Languages, told the media.
What is it?
A mental health website defines brain rot as “a condition of mental fogginess, lethargy, reduced attention span, and cognitive decline that results from an overabundance of screen time.” And it has real consequences: “difficulty organizing information, solving problems, making decisions, and recalling information.”
Anyone hooked on Skibidi Toilet videos will be familiar with these symptoms.
The first recorded use of the term “brain rot” was in 1854, in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden. “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?” he wrote.
Thoreau's complaint suggests that people have been stuffing their craniums with junk food for a long time. But smartphones have supercharged it. Just look around on any subway car; they’re all glued to their screens – and they’re not reading Shakespeare. The term brain rot increased in usage frequency by 230 percent between 2023 and 2024, which reflects both increased incidence of the disease and heightened anxiety about how to cope with it.
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Surprisingly, a leading campaigner against brain rot is Pope Francis. He often mentions the dangers of becoming immersed in social media. His angle, though, is not falling standards of literacy, but the danger of becoming more self-absorbed and less empathetic.
This year he published two challenging letters to those responsible for training priests in the Catholic Church, one on the importance of reading literature, and the other on the study of history. For him, it’s not a theoretical issue. Priests are on the front line of his dream of rechristianising the modern world. This is a gnarly topic, but the Pope is basically warning bishops that if their priests know all about liturgy and theology but little about humanity, they will be flops at evangelising.
He recommends reading novels and poems as an avenue to developing human and spiritual maturity. “Literature helps readers to topple the idols of a self-referential, falsely self-sufficient and statically conventional language,” he says. Novels and poetry introduce people to the human heart at its most ardent, most vulnerable, most idealistic:
Another striking image for the role of literature comes from the activity of the human body, and specifically the act of digestion. The eleventh-century monk William of Saint-Thierry and the seventeenth-century Jesuit Jean-Joseph Surin developed the image of a cow chewing her cud – ruminatio – as an image of contemplative reading. … Literature helps us to reflect on the meaning of our presence in this world, to “digest” and assimilate it, and to grasp what lies beneath the surface of our experience. Literature, in a word, serves to interpret life, to discern its deeper meaning and its essential tensions.
Rumination. What a wonderfully evocative word for the work of reading! If what we read fails to spark moments of rumination, we’re in danger of brain rot. News trivia, stale jokes, and idle sneers provide nothing for rumination. Good literature does. (Mercator has published two lists for ruminative reading – 101 books Gen Y must read before they die and 101 books Millennials must read before they die – check them out, please.)
After his reflections on literature earlier this year, the Pope turned to the study of history. Again, he emphasised the need for depth – we study history not to accumulate facts for trivial pursuit but to know ourselves and our societies better.
He introduces a useful distinction. Internet brain rot is diachronic or horizontal– concerned only with the here and now. But the human spirit needs to be synchronic, vertical, – looking to the past and the future. “No one can truly know their deepest identity, or what they wish to be in the future, without attending to the bonds that link them to preceding generations,” he writes.
Essentially Pope Francis is saying that control of smartphones is a moral crisis. If we fail to help the emerging generation conquer brain rot, we will have a lot to answer for. Society will be run by post-literate morons who grew up watching Skibidi Toilet videos.
Forward this to your friends.
Michael Cook is editor of Mercator.
Image credit: cartoon by Brian Doyle
Have your say!
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David Young commented 2024-12-08 15:00:50 +1100Agreed Rob
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Rob McKilliam commented 2024-12-08 03:28:42 +1100Hi David. Thanks for the clarification. I understand and agree with you.
I’d just add that I think Critic Thinking (reasoning?) is one of the things we should learn to do. -
David Young commented 2024-12-08 03:08:47 +1100Hi again Rob – and the learning is not about children although we can include them. It’s about you and me and others like you and me
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David Young commented 2024-12-08 03:06:36 +1100Hi Rob – it’s not learning about stuff. We can all stuff our heads with information. It is learning to DO stuff. We all need to learn how to DO stuff because there is new stuff being created every day. AI is the latest example. We need to learn how to USE it. Hope that clarifies why we need to learn
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Rob McKilliam commented 2024-12-07 15:40:18 +1100David: I think the skill for the 21st century is the ability to think critically about stuff rather than to learn stuff.
I think children today should be taught the four R’s, ie: Reading, Riting, Rithmatik and Reasoning. -
Juan Llor Baños commented 2024-12-07 04:56:23 +1100extraordinary!!
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mrscracker commented 2024-12-07 03:14:43 +1100I think Pope Francis is largely correct in this but from what I’ve read, he might benefit from a little more time on the internet & less time amongst his circle of advisors. We only know what our informants know.
The internet can lead us down some silly rabbit holes it’s true, but like travel it can also expose us to differing views & encourage broadmindedness. -
David Young commented 2024-12-06 23:32:16 +1100My mother taught me to read when I was four or five. I don’t remember when I couldn’t read. Reading is your passport to privilege. I am not ashamed of being privileged. I am grateful to parents for helping me get there. I have done the same for my 3 sons and they have done the same for their sons. My great grandson has started off doing the same for his 2 year old son. (no daughters or grand-daughters’ in my lineage – yet).
The ability for ordinary people to read was created by the translation of the bible into German and the invention of the printing press. (1450). This spread rapidly through the western world. “The WEIRDest People in the World” – Joseph Heinrich (2020). The Scots were the first to introduce free education for both men and women hence the Industrial Revolution was initiated largely at the outset by the Scots
In the 20th century the greatest barrier to development was illiteracy. In the 21st century it will be the ability to learn (Jay Conrad Levinson in “The Guerilla Marketing Handbook” (1994)) -
Steven Meyer commented 2024-12-06 15:24:15 +1100I think the Macquarie Dictionary has a point. If I were compiling a list of candidates that would be my number 2.
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